Bo Jameson “Bo” Ebeling and Grant Harriman are gearing up for an experience very few teens have: creating music with LA’s finest with the 20th annual Grammy Camp.
The Grammy Museum hosts the seven-day, music-industry camp from Sunday, July 14, to Saturday, July 20, at Village Studios. Eighty-three students across 76 cities and 22 states were chosen.
Major artists from various genres have recorded at the Village Studios, which is housed in a vintage masonic temple.
The camp provides opportunities for students to learn about different disciplines in the music industry and network with professionals in the business. Among this year’s special guests will be bass player and singer Blu DeTiger, Grammy-winning artist Maren Morris, and singer-songwriter and producer Jeremy Zucker.
The camp is broken up into “tracks,” including audio engineering, electronic music production, songwriting, vocal performance, music and media, the music business and instrumental performance.
Ebeling, a 17-year-old senior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, applied for music production, audio engineering and songwriting, but audio engineering was his first choice.
“Honestly, I had no idea which option to choose, because I do a lot,” Ebeling said.
“I’m a music producer. I’m a songwriter. I really want to learn more about the music business because that’s the industry I want to go into. I thought audio engineering would be a fun and useful skill to learn more about. I know about audio engineering, but it’s one of those things where there’s always more to learn. … I thought it would be a great way to get professional experience in that realm.”
As part of the application process, he submitted examples of songs he had audio-engineered, produced and written.
“You also had to write down what your process was in audio-engineering them. That’s a whole essay. … It’s like a mini college application. There’s a video essay of who you are as an artist, who’s your inspiration and what you want to do,” Ebeling said.
Bo Ebeling started playing guitar in the fourth grade, but he also plays bass, writes songs on piano, and has dabbled on drums and ukulele.
Ebeling said the camp will allow him to work in a professional studio environment, with high-level equipment.
“It’s tough when those microphones are somewhere between $500 and $1,000 each,” Ebeling said. “It’s not really something that I have at home, where I can plug in this $1,000 or $2,000 microphone into this $100,0000 mixing board. … It’s going to be a really awesome opportunity to be able to use the mixing console.”
The camp also allows students like Ebeling and Harriman a chance to work with each other within and across teams. Ebeling expects that the audio-engineering students will collaborate with the songwriting students at some point.
Ebeling is interested in a career in the music industry and has recently been looking into college programs and internships.
He started playing the guitar in the fourth grade. He plays the guitar and bass and writes songs on the piano, which he picked up in high school.
He has also dabbled on the drums and the ukulele.
Through his high school career, he taken classes and had hands-on experience in different parts of music-making.
He applied to the arts school as a jazz guitarist, something in which he didn’t have a lot of experience.
He said that LACHSA is a very prestigious school and is very competitive to get into, and he was excited to get accepted.
During his time at the school, he has noticed growth in his skills set.
Grant Harriman wants to be an everyman musician like Sophie, Fred Again, Aphex Twin and the Prodigy.
“I got to have more traditional training in jazz and theory while continuing to write songs by myself. I think it was my sophomore year, I got to take this music technology class, in which I started to learn how to record and how to produce. … I’ve always thought about being a music producer, because as a person, I really listen to a lot of different kinds of music. I love writing my own songs, but I really love collaborating with different people because every time you collaborate with someone, you get to be a different artist for a day,” Ebeling said.
Marina del Rey teen Harriman is just as thrilled to be chosen for Grammy Camp. He longed to attend it after participating in a one-day Grammy event. Harriman chose the electronic music production track.
He has the Boys & Girls Club to thank for his introduction to music. Harriman hung out at the Venice Beach center after school and took advantage of the studio equipment provided by well-known producer Scott Litt.
Harriman messed around with it starting in sixth grade but didn’t “didn’t hit it very hard” until a year later.
His goal is to be an everyman musician like Sophie, Fred Again, Aphex Twin and the Prodigy.
“Ideally, I want to do everything and anything,” he said. “I want to be a self-sustaining artist who does their own visuals, DJs, and knows how to perform live with Ableton (music software).”
A student at Da Vinci Connect High School in El Segundo, Harriman is an aberration in his family, as his relatives are not musicians. His parents are in the medical field.
“Music, for me, is a completely spontaneous and random interest,” he said. “It started when I would listen a hip-hop radio station in LA. I found EDM catchier. I was influenced by (DJ) Mustard.
“He uses a lot of EDM elements in his rap beats. Grammy Camp is going to be amazing, though.”
